For the past 3 years I've organized a race/ride in Bozeman, MT called Morganzo 55: Double Nickels on the Grime. It's a beautiful ride in an amazing part of the country -- Mon-fucking-tana.
I'm curious about how far people travel for gravel races and would appreciate any input you care to share:
Have you ever traveled a significant distance for a kickass gravel race? Would having a free place to crash for a couple nights make you more likely to do so? Would you bring a mountain bike along to ride some singletrack, too? How far is too far to travel, even for a kickass gravel race? Do you require a certain number of local breweries when choosing a destination? Or will you be bringing your own 30-packs of Old Milwaukee?
Still, Bozeman is almost a 24-hour drive from Dallas, so 55 miles is a short race for us to travel so far. Not that we're elite endurance athletes by any means (we're the slow & long types) - we just like to get our saddle time's worth for a drive like that. We've driven from Dallas to Michigan and Tennessee for 1-day 100-mile NUE races, and even that was a lot of travel for only 1 day of riding.
What usually makes it worthwhile for us is working events into a week's vacation - so, if there's some awesome single track to ride locally (or other stuff to do) that would be very enticing. We did a great trip once where Lorinda did an IronMan in Idaho; then we travelled to South Dakota over the week hitting a few fun spots and did the NUE race in South Dakota the following weekend. And we did a long vacation once where we raced a NUE in Alta, then spent the week in Jackson, then started Breck Epic the following weekend.
If your event were multi-day that would also be pretty cool and might make the drive time worthwhile.
To answer your questions: 1. The farthest we've travelled for a GRAVEL race is 7 hours (Dirty Kanza). 2. Having a free place to crash would definitely help, though we usually pay for kitchenettes so we can cook for ourselves (budget & health). 3. We rarely travel without multiple bikes :-) and at the risk of being kicked off this forum, much prefer good single track to anything else. 4. I doubt we'd do more than a 2-day drive for anything less than a week's vacation. But 2 days takes you a long ways. 5. We much prefer to sample local brews when we can find them, but bring our own as a backup.
Hope that helps.
EDIT: I forgot, we've done the OGRE in Missouri a few times on the tandem as well. That's about 9 hours driving, I think. Worth it for a 150 miles though. Very tough race.
lotomojo wrote:For the past 3 years I've organized a race/ride in Bozeman, MT called Morganzo 55: Double Nickels on the Grime. It's a beautiful ride in an amazing part of the country -- Mon-fucking-tana.
I'm curious about how far people travel for gravel races and would appreciate any input you care to share:
Have you ever traveled a significant distance for a kickass gravel race? Would having a free place to crash for a couple nights make you more likely to do so? Would you bring a mountain bike along to ride some singletrack, too? How far is too far to travel, even for a kickass gravel race? Do you require a certain number of local breweries when choosing a destination? Or will you be bringing your own 30-packs of Old Milwaukee?
Thanks for your input!
I would definitely travel to a race! I had planned to do just that for RPI last year, but ended up unable to do so. It was too bad, I had already paid for my registration and made some plans. It's something I hope to do in the future!
For me, too far is probably more than a 2-day drive. I'm not interested in flying, and I love to road trip. (So, most of the US is in this realm for me.)
Free place to crash- possibly. I love to camp, but it is not an option anymore if my husband is with me. I guess I would make a vacation out of the whole thing, rent a nicer cabin or hotel, and enjoy having a nice hot shower and some recovery options. If I was going on my own, a free camping spot would be awesome.
I see that this is also a very old post. I did google your ride and see that you had it this year. I am the newbie to gravel riding and yes I flew 1054 miles for my first gravel race in Marysville Kansas The Pony Express 120. I opted for the 75 miler because of some medical issues and it being my first gravel race. Like others have posted I would only fly out to your event if it was a 100 miler or so. I hope you had a great ride this year but yes I am looking to ride gravel races in as many states that I can. Staying at somebody's house before the event was be a big bonus as that would lower some of the expenses.
